EPA’s Scott Pruitt Doesn’t Say Earth is Flat, But…

Scott Pruitt’s EPA and the current EPA mandates are at loggerheads. Headlines about Pruitt’s EPA appointees scream warnings that he’s putting people in power who are “climate change deniers.” That’s not quite true — many of them, including Pruitt himself, recognize the planet is warming up. They just believe we can’t know why climate change is happening. Specifically, whether humans have had an impact on it. There are prominent, decorated scientists like Ivar Giaever who share Pruitt’s view, but not many. (NASA publishes a list of science groups who represent the consensus opinion of anthropogenic contribution to climate change.) The EPA aligns with the consensus, at least today for now.

The EPA website clearly states in a big header: “Humans are largely responsible for recent climate change.” (Look now; it may not be there much longer.) Pruitt says this instead:

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet.”

Scott Pruitt’s EPA and the current EPA mandates are at loggerheads. Headlines about Pruitt’s EPA appointees scream warnings that he’s putting people in power who are “climate change deniers.” That’s not quite true — many of them, including Pruitt himself, recognize the planet is warming up. They just believe we can’t know why climate change...